Author: Adam Lee

Coming Monday:

I’m surprised I’ve been posting music videos this long without mentioning one of my favorite artists at the moment, the English indie rock group Florence + the Machine. (As you can tell, I seem to have a thing for U.K. rock bands.) F+TM’s style is darkly moody, gothic, operatic, held together and propelled by the…

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter VI As Dagny drifts through the crowds at Hank’s party, she overhears a conversation: “Last night,” said the spinster, “I stayed awake because of the shooting. There were guns going off all night, way out at sea. There were no flashes. There was nothing. Just those detonations, at long intervals……

When I last wrote about Richard Dawkins, it was to report on the backlash over some clumsy, badly-judged remarks that he made about Islam. I was hoping that, at the very least, he’d learned a lesson from all the criticism he received and would watch his words more carefully in the future. But alas: In…

This article was originally published on AlterNet. The Christian right in America, like all organized religions, claims to have a correct and exclusive understanding of God’s will. To hear them tell it, the almighty creator of the universe has strong opinions about corporate tax rates, firearm ownership, and what consenting adults do with their genitals,…

Ayn Rand thinks everyone should be into kinky sex; the looters are human slime; and some unexpected sentimentality.

Since it looks more likely than not that the U.S. is going to attack the Assad regime in Syria, I wanted to write down some of the thoughts that have been on my mind the last few days. I don’t have any particular reason to doubt that Assad used chemical weapons. We know that he…

Intelligence Squared is a group that organizes live public debates on political and philosophical topics. I’ve been to one of their New York City events before, a debate about whether the world would be better off without religion. In general, I’m all for this idea. It’s a welcome echo of the era of Robert Ingersoll,…

Earlier this month, the first ever lab-grown hamburger was eaten at a taste test in London. The tasters’ reports were guardedly positive: Upon tasting the burger, Austrian food researcher Ms Ruetzler said: “I was expecting the texture to be more soft… there is quite some intense taste; it’s close to meat, but it’s not that…

Atlas Shrugged, part I, chapter VI As Hank finishes dressing and goes downstairs to the party he’s dreading (which is being thrown, remember, to celebrate his wedding anniversary), his mind is elsewhere. He’s dwelling on a newspaper editorial he read earlier, about a proposed “Equalization of Opportunity” bill: The editorial said that at a time…